Up and About (Mostly)

Friday, July 28, 2006


Up and About (sort of)

I awoke today with my back almost normal, and the pain from my toe down to a dull roar. I celebrated my ability to walk by forgiving, momentarily, whichever one of my simian ancestors first decided that walking on two legs sounded like a cool idea. I’m sure I’ll have occasion to curse him many times in the future, but this morning, standing upright next to my bed, I thrust out my chest in solidarity with my People.

Frisco, too, was noticeably more stable on his feet. I threw his frisbee for him, and he fetched it two or three times, eagerly but with effort. He still fell once or twice, but he was able to steady himself with a wide-legged stance.

I was working on the computer most of the day, but not long after dark I finished up my projects and decided to take Frisco for another installment of Operation Soft Landing.

Bull Creek Park is a recent discovery of Frisco’s and mine. It seems like an idyllic and comfy little place along a Texas-style creek, but if you look closely the entire, unfriendly natural history of Texas’s Hill Country can be read in its terrain.

Texas is a raging beast, barely tamed by modernity.One can spend, as I have spent, years upon years on the surface of this land without recognizing its destructive force. A careful eye to a place like Bull Creek reveals the awesome power of this land, and the even more amazing power of Man.

I first came to Austin from the West, across the desert, and I was stunned by the green and rolling hills as I approached central Texas. But just under the surface of those hills lies cold, hard limestone, which Robert Caro described as the anvil on which Texans were pounded down for a century or more.

Bull Creek curls its way through lush, green hills dotted with the homes of the wealthy. The park itself is grassy and tree-shaded. But there are no banks to this creek, not in the sense I am used to. The creek runs in a brutal flood plain of hard yellow stone, perhaps forty feet across, with little holes and hollows pounded out by millennia of occasional, raging floods. No earth survives, and no vegetation. Only a few waist-high tufts of harsh grasses grow out of little holes in the rock, to be destroyed and replaced each time the creek floods.

On a weekend afternoon, the place seems tame, filled with children playing the natural water-slides, plunging down a little waterfall, exploring the huge boulders carved by former floods. Just a few months ago, Frisco was splashing along with them, chasing his ball in the churning eddies and, when the waters were high, challenging himself to fight the current.

He knew we were in a ball-chasing place as soon as I parked the car, and I gave him a few easy throws up on the grassy parkland above the waters. No matter how easy I made it, though, he stumbled around in frustration to find the ball. I’m not sure if he sees anything at all in the darkness, and his disorientation sent him in the wrong direction every time. By the time we made it down to the creek, he had lost most of his pride and both of his racquetballs.

It was a quiet night, and the creek was low. Frisco still runs for water, but he no longer tries to swim. He splashed around in a shallow part of the flow, making little circles to the right, his head tilted at a 45 degree angle. I found a rock where it wasn’t too harsh to sit, soothing my bad toe in the cold waters, and he lay in the water next to me for a time.

He knew he was missing racquetballs, though, and he can never rest when one is missing. He struggled to his feet and thrashed around looking for them. (Never mind that they were two hundred feet up the hill.) He didn’t have the dexterity to handle the slippery rocks, though, and he fell and cracked his head several times. (So much for “Operation Soft Landing.”)

I made him lie next to me for an hour or so, watching the lights go out in the opulent houses overlooking our valley. A handful of late-night dog-walkers came and went, and Frisco managed to find the energy to lope over to each one, angling to the right, tail flinging water in all directions. “You have a beautiful dog,” one girl called out, and I couldn’t find a voice to thank her.

Frisco was frustrated and wanted to go, so I packed up my pen and notebook and started back up the hill. He ran off chasing toads and snakes, but he didn’t stray far. Mine was the only car in the lot as I hoisted him into the back seat and headed off. He was a smelly, wet, exhausted mess when we got home -- but he still made me throw his frisbee three or four times in the back yard as I finished writing this daily report.